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Buying real estate investment properties doesn’t have to be complicated. With Web3, the sky is the limit to what you can do. Roofstock onChain marries real estate investing with blockchain technology to help you simplify the process. In this episode, we are joined by its Chief Blockchain Officer, Geoffrey Thompson, and the Head of Web3 Initiatives, Sanjay Raghavan. Together, they share with us how they are giving investors the ability to purchase tokenized single-family rental properties and laying the building blocks for a brighter future in home buying. Plus, they also discuss some hot topics: the recent celebrity yuga lawsuit, Polygon’s popularity, how humans can overcome the Shiny Object Syndrome, and more!

Listen to the podcast here

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Geoffrey Thompson & Sanjay Raghavan Of Roofstock onChain - Web3 RE Investing, Plus: Celebrity Yuga Lawsuit, Polygon’s Popularity, Gamers Like Bitcoin Over NFTs, And More…

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I'm Sanjay Raghavan. We're from Roofstock onChain, a platform that gives investors the ability to purchase tokenized single-family rental properties. We're here on the Edge of NFT, the show that gives you the ability to find your true home in Web3.

Stay tuned for this episode to learn how Roofstock is laying building blocks for a brighter future in home buying, and why we hope to pass along real estate assets to the next generation but not necessarily our dance moves, plus proof that humans are always going to suffer from shiny object syndrome and how to learn from it. Don't forget that we put together a gathering called NFT LA that brought out thousands of the world's most innovative doers in the Web3 space. Head to NFTLA.live to get tickets to our bigger, bolder, and better but just as intimate and impactful event happening in Los Angeles from March 20th through the 23rd, 2023. See you there.

This episode features Geoffrey Thompson and Sanjay Raghavan of Roofstock onChain, the platform that simplifies buying and owning properties with the Web3 generation. Geoff is the Chief Blockchain Officer of Roofstock onChain where he leads the real estate investing platform's foray into Web3. After being accepted into Cypher Accelerator, the first-of-its-kind Wharton-backed program for blockchain startups, Geoff continued to push the blockchain ecosystem forward through real estate investing.

Geoff built his career at top-tier law firms practicing in the areas of capital markets, banking and credit, structured finance, private equity, and cross-border transactions. Geoff's prior role at Roofstock was as general counsel where he advised on partnerships, product innovation, fundraising, deal structuring, real estate matters, securities law, international expansion, and all other legal and compliance matters.

Sanjay is the Head of Web3 Initiatives of Roofstock onChain where he leads the real estate investing platform's blockchain initiative. After being accepted into Cypher Accelerator, Sanjay continues to build connections between real estate investing and blockchain. Sanjay is also an advisor at Pudgy Penguins NFTs. Roofstock onChain is the Web3 subsidiary of Roofstock, the leading digital real estate investing platform for the $4 trillion single-family rental home sector.

Using blockchain technology, Roofstock onChain provides investors with the ability to purchase tokenized single-family real estate properties with one click and to transact with crypto, cutting the time and cost incurred by legacy systems. Sanjay and Geoffrey, you are both wonderful audio-visual setup participants on the show. We want to acknowledge that right up front. We were just saying before we got started that you've been our quickest setup. You deserve that recognition. Perhaps we need to mint a special NFT for it. Welcome to the show. It's great to have you here.

Thanks for having us. It's a pleasure.

It's great to be here.

It's great to see you. I spent several years developing commercial real estate out of Washington, DC. It's near and dear to my heart. It has been a part of my entire life. I thought about it. I was exposed to so many different attempts to find the thread that brings blockchain and real estate together. There have been a lot of iterations over the last several years but it seems like you are onto something here. We're pumped to dive in on it, but we want to start at the beginning and understand how did you two meet and how did the idea come to be.

We met at Roofstock. We had the same first day at Roofstock. We didn't know each other prior to that but we onboarded together. At that time, we had different roles. Sanjay was heading up the securities group at Roofstock and I was the general counsel. We worked together on a lot of projects there. We had some big wins, and then over time, we morphed into a different Web3 business unit. We can get into the details of that.

That's very cool. Sanjay, is there anything to add there?

Just a funny tidbit. Back then, we were all in the office IRL. There were these little plastic palm trees that they would put on the desk when a new person was joining so you could look across the office and say, "There are five new guys." On that particular day, Geoff and I were the little plastic palm trees. We got to say hi to each other like, "You're the GC. I'm going to be doing security stuff." There was a partnership that started on that day. It's more than three years back and it's still going strong. It has been great to work together.

How did the move toward blockchain come about? Was that something brewing internally? Were you part of the initial discovery team that led that? How did that part of this come together?

Geoff and I have been the tip of the spear for innovation at Roofstock for a few years now. Together, we built a very innovative Real Estate Investment Trust or REIT product for Roofstock. Both Geoff and I had been trying to get up to speed on what was happening on the crypto, blockchain, and Web3 front. Geoff had been an advisor to other crypto projects in the past.

Our leadership team knew that we both had an interest in the industry. About eighteen months back, the board formally asked our CEO to look into whether Web3 can add value to what we were doing in Roofstock and real estate, which is primarily trying to make it easier for people to buy single-family properties and do so remotely because if you're living in New York or LA where property prices can be in the seven figures, it may not always be possible for people to build real estate portfolios where they're living, but you could do so in Atlanta, Indianapolis, Alabama, and so on.

Roofstock's mission has always been to simplify buying real estate investment properties. The board wanted us to seize it. There's something we can do with Web3 that gets us closer to that mission. The two of us were asked to take this on as a research project in addition to our existing 80-hour-a-week role. There was an intense six months where we were looking into Web3.

We came back with a clear use case that this technology does have a lot of promise. There were enough pieces of the infrastructure already in place. For example, in 2017, while you had Ethereum and some of the building blocks, USDC was not yet around. You couldn't combine USDC and Ethereum in a way that some of these transactions are possible on NFT marketplaces.

A lot of these pieces were in place for us to then add the final layer, which was creating a representation of a real-world asset on the blockchain. When we came up with the use case, the board and the leadership recognized that there was value in trying this out. They asked us both to move out from our existing roles and create a dedicated Web3 unit and asked us to lead it.

That's a cool story. I'm glad that we met in New York in the four hours I was in New York before flying over to Singapore. When I heard about what you were doing, I was like, "Wow." I've been talking about this use case ever since because of the edge of utility. This has been something that has been discussed and pondered for many years. I remember Jeff and I getting pitches for this type of concept back in 2017, but people have a hard time pulling it off. It sounds great going from philosophical to the mechanics of how this works. It’s a totally different ballgame. We would love to dive in with you on how this works.

This was a year of intense building and intense dead ends at least on a weekly if not a daily basis. It felt like we got to the end of possibilities. The whole essence of building is figuring out what to do when you get to that point and how to keep going. That's what we did repeatedly. A lot of it came down to structuring legal issues and putting those first because, at the end of the day, if this isn't legally enforceable, it's useless. The whole point is that you can use an NFT smart contract to transact real estate. That's supposed to be in one click.

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It's the same as buying a Punk or an Ape. We want that real estate transaction to happen that way and not just use the NFT as a redeemable that you can then go do a traditional closing and settlement process offline. What we feel we have helped to move the ball forward is being able to re-engineer the traditional closing and settlement process, and fit it into a standard ERC-721 transaction. A lot of things have to change both in the real estate aspect of it and the ERC-721.

For example, we needed to throw in a KYC, which we can get into how we did that with a Soulbound token. On the real estate side, what we had to figure out was all of these aspects of real estate that have to be true in the real world. They still have to be true for these transactions. There still has to be an inspection on the property. You still have to know if taxes have been paid. You still have to make sure that there's a clean title. All of that stuff has to be part of the equation.

What we did was move all of that forward in the process so that we have completed all of the diligence for the buyer before it even becomes a listing, unlike a traditional real estate transaction where the buyer would make an offer and then kick off an inspection process, which then kicks off another diligence process, which then kicks off more negotiation. We move the inspection up front. We have all of the pictures. We have records of recent renovations. We have all of that stuff that a buyer needs to know. At the time that they have made their purchase decision, it is a one-click experience. I'll let Sanjay speak a little bit more about that, and also the NFT side of things, and what we had to change.

If you look at the high level, what are the couple of problems that we are trying to solve here? The first one is that the traditional real estate settlement process takes 3 to 4 weeks for an owner-occupied property. If you're locked talking about an investment property, sometimes that's even longer. During these 3 or 4 weeks, once an offer has been made and accepted by the seller, you have all these contingencies built into that offer. There's an inspection and an appraisal happening. There's a financing contingency.

This period is an intense period of stress for both the buyer and seller because once the inspection results come in, you might see that there's a leak in the roof. Some of the plumbing needs to be repaired. You're then going back and negotiating the price. Sometimes a buyer and seller can agree on a renegotiated price. Sometimes you can't, and then the offer falls through. You have to go back, re-list the property, and start the process all over again.

From the buyer's perspective, you may have been pre-qualified for a loan a month back. You might have been making offers for a month or so. By the time your offer is accepted, the interest rates might have shifted by then. If you're trying to go back and get your final underwriting done, the underwriters might come back and say, "You don't qualify for this loan anymore because of X, Y and Z." You're then trying to buy down interest rate through points and this and that.

For both the buyer and seller, this process is intensely stressful and not a pleasurable experience. It also involves a lot of intermediaries. It takes a long time to complete and costs a lot of money. When you look at how you can simplify that, the analogy I would use there is Alibaba versus Amazon. You can go and pick a product on Alibaba and then hand that manufacturing to a Chinese manufacturer. They take the next four weeks to build it. It's put on a container ship, comes over to Los Angeles, gets shipped to a warehouse, and gets stuck to wherever you need it delivered. That can take 6 or 7 weeks.

If that's the experience you want, that's available for you, or you can go to Amazon and click the button. Amazon Prime delivers it the same day, the next day, or in a couple of days. If you want that convenience and if that convenience matters to you, and you want to have that stress-free experience, then this is an elegant way to look at how single-family homes can be distributed using Web3 technologies and make things easier, simpler, faster, cheaper, and more transparent.

That's one part of the equation. The second part of the equation is financing. Anybody who has tried to purchase an investment property and get financing for that knows how incredibly hard that process is. That's years of tax returns, pay stubs, all your bank statements, all your other retirement statements, and this and that. If you're going through a Fannie Mae approval process, it limits the number of investment properties you can buy.

Once you go outside of the limit of ten investment properties, then you're looking at hard money lenders, private lenders, and non-bank lenders. That process has typically much higher interest rates and involves personal guarantees. Often, it's not easy to get those either. When you look at that process in the TradFi world, it's a very broken process. It's expensive and time-consuming. If there is an easier way to use on-chain financing, whether it's pure DeFi or some kind of hybrid financing, that allows people to get cheaper and faster asset-based financing. We're talking about investment properties here.

If you're buying an apartment building, and nobody is looking at your credit score and your income when they're underwriting the apartment building, they look at the net operating income of the building, and the Debt-Service Coverage Ratio or DSCR. The underwriting is done very differently for any income-producing building in the commercial real estate space. When you look at single-family even if that home is supposed to be an income-producing home, the underwriting looks at your personal credit, income, taxes, and all that stuff. That's also a broken process in a way. Through DeFi and blockchain, we can solve that problem as well and make it a simpler, faster, and cheaper experience.

Putting these two things together creates this unbelievable convenience for the purchaser and seller as well, but more so from the buyer's perspective. We feel that is the thing that's going to bring over time more of the Web2 people also to focus on a new way of doing things using Web3. We hope the next bull run cycle in crypto and DeFi is led by real-world assets, both ours and others. There are so many other interesting use cases people are working on. We hope that all of those pick up in the next cycle.

Rumor has it that folks like Bill Gates are picking up real estate like crazy. It has been traditionally a relatively good investment over the long haul. It seems like this also makes this type of investment more accessible. That's what you're talking about from the buyer's side. The owner or the seller has already invested in real estate in the first place, or else they wouldn't be able to sell something. I can see how you can leverage that side of things, get more of the market, and maybe even add stability to the real estate market by having more players involved and things like this. It's very exciting.

One other thing to add to that is we talked about the benefits for the real estate investor, but if you flip that coin and look at the benefits for the Web3 and crypto investors, crypto investors who have been searching for yield-generating products typically had to rely on Voyager, BlockFi, Celsius, and Terra LUNA back in the day. Anchor Protocol had these high-interest rates. Some of those interest rates are unsustainable and based on poor risk management principles.

Nevertheless, the problem is if you leave a DeFi site, which is working fine as intended, a lot of the people that ended up using hybrid solutions or centralized solutions had to lose custody of their crypto and hand it over to somebody else to generate a yield on it. In a lot of cases, there has been a domino effect. When Genesis has a problem, there's a cascading effect that affects everybody else as well.

From our point of view, rental properties are cashflowing assets. By selling them as NFTs, you can still stay in the crypto world. You don't have to off-ramp to fiat to buy these, but now you have an asset that you can self-custody. It produces rent because tenants are paying rent. You can collect that money either in fiat, USDC or ETH if you want. You have a way now to create a 4% to 4.5% yield product without losing custody of your crypto.

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It's completely non-correlated to the rest of the crypto markets. Its price is not going to change based on the prevailing price of Bitcoin or ETH. We feel that for almost every crypto institution and crypto treasury, it makes sense to look at real estate as a risk diversification strategy. You can be long on Bitcoin, ETH, and any other L1s that you have a belief in. You can have your native coins and all that, but it's prudent to have 5% or 10% of your treasury allocated to a product like this where you can make non-correlated yields on it.

That makes a lot of sense. There will be more room for more diversity within crypto and NFTs as it mixes and mingles in DeFi with all sorts of things. You sold your first real estate NFT purchase with USDC through the onChain home financing. Can you give us a bit of detail about that transaction? Do you want to start Geoff?

That was a property that we acquired because we believed that was a good asset. We liked the location. Roofstock has a lot of expertise in this area. It's a very good property in the first place. We looked at a couple of different buyers who were close to wanting to pull the trigger. Ultimately, the person who did this is based in the Southeast and is a lawyer, but is also into crypto. He's a real estate investor but has spent some time in the space and wants to see Web3 succeed and move forward.

He was coming at it with a lot of enthusiasm and a big vote of confidence. We did get him better financing terms that he couldn't have gotten anywhere else as well. It's a great property. It was a win-win all the way around. What was funny about that for us is we worked so hard to close the deal and get the deal and everything wrapped up. It was our first transaction. We were testing the pipes. You never know for sure if everything is going to work until you do it. It worked and it was great.

On a Friday afternoon, we were slapping high-fives. We took the rest of the afternoon off. We had a press release that was embargoed until Tuesday. We figured we will have a light weekend. Everything happened that we didn't expect. It was picked up on NFT stats as the most valuable NFT that was sold in that 24-hour period. It started popping up on Twitter. The next thing we knew, people were making YouTube videos about it.

Milk Road picked us up. It created this little firestorm of conversations, ideas, podcasts, and all kinds of marketing and PR requests. That was not planned. If you were looking from the outside, there was no master plan there. That just happened. We fell into it, but when that happened, that was the ultimate gratification. There is an interest in what we're doing.

We have spent the whole year in a greenfield space, at least as far as we're concerned, building up from first principles and not trying to emulate what other people have done with real estate in the past on NFTs. We got to a solution that's custom and new. A lot of legal things had to be solved. We saw that we did deliver something that has a product-market fit here. This matters. We got it right. That's how that all went down.

Here's an interesting tidbit there. Geoff and I are going to be speaking at an event in New York on Tuesday. Saturday and Sunday, there was a little bit of chatter on Twitter. Some people have noticed it but we are still good for our press release on Tuesday morning. On Monday, Milk Road reported on it, and then a bunch of people started tweeting and sharing it. It went viral on crypto Twitter on Monday. I was flying from Seattle to New York and connected my Wi-Fi on the plane. I was like, "This is a lot more than I expected to see on a Monday."

I was actively answering questions. When you see the Web3 community so passionately involved and talking about it, tweeting, sharing, and asking questions, the right thing to do is drop everything else and be there to answer those questions. I started doing that Monday morning on the flight. I got into New York, went to the hotel, and thought, "I might be able to do this for another 3 to 4 hours and still get a few hours of sleep." I just keep going. By the time I finish answering 100 comments, 200 new comments have shown up. After a while at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning, I thought, "There's no way I can handle this on my own."

When Jeff and I met up in the morning, we did our talk. We found a corner. Both of us opened our laptops and spent the next two days going through Twitter comments and answering. It has been gratifying to see how upbeat the crypto and Web3 community has been about this, especially at a time when there's so much bad news in crypto all around. People do support good projects and are optimistic about them. That's very gratifying.

That's quite a story. That's special at that moment when you realize there's product-market fit and it has been demonstrated. That's a special moment.

We were both elated. Even since then, we have been spending most of the last couple of months at events and conferences. We would show up somewhere. People would be like, "What are you into?" We would be like, "We're finding ways to sell real estate easily using Web3 technologies." They would say, "Have you heard about that South Carolina property that somebody sold?" We would be like, "That was us." Random people know about it. That's immensely gratifying.

There's so much fun at this early stage. As cool as it is and as much opportunity there is and as revolutionary as it is, it's still early days. I'm curious. As you think about these opportunities ahead of you, what do those look like for this platform of NFTs and Web3, and everything that it can do for real estate with your project? How are you doing that? What are the other elements that you think are going to be revolutionary here?

We have two big buckets. One is to scale up the NFT homes, keep selling those, and help build some liquidity on the secondary markets after the sellers that have held it for a certain amount of time, want to resell, and see how those secondaries work. As part of that, we do think that this is potentially a very interesting building block for organizations in the Web3 space. For individual investors, it makes a lot of sense. We do see a lot of crypto treasuries or the treasuries of Web3 companies that maintain their entire treasury in crypto. They don't want to off-ramp into fiat. They pay vendors and employees in crypto. That's the way they operate.

There are a lot of benefits to doing business that way. One of the limitations is that you don't have a lot of diversity in your portfolio. You don't have a lot of options. If you're a protocol, a DAO, or even a VC-funded company that got funded in stablecoins, you don't have a place to park your money that is going to be stable but also generates some yield. That's what this is. This is the ultimate stable asset. This is real estate. This is a $4 trillion market in the US. We all know and love homes. That's not a scary concept to anyone. What is a little bit scary for some of the institutions is, "How do I manage this at scale?"

That's what Roofstock does. The whole company has been built up since 2015. There are 600 people at the company that do that precise activity. They source homes and manage homes. As a Web3 institution, you have access to that. You can buy crypto. You can receive your rental payments in crypto. You can sell it through an NFT marketplace anytime you want to balance your portfolio. That’s where we would like to see this go in 2023. It is to become more of a building block in the Web3 ecosystem as a whole. The other big bucket is the DeFi initiative, which Sanjay spoke about a little bit. I'll let him go ahead and speak to that now.

Even coming back to the topic you were discussing earlier, Geoff, SFR as an asset class as demonstrated is a $4 trillion asset class. There are twenty million rental units in the US. Institutions have been taking bite-sized chunks out of it for the last 5 to 6 years. In the past, you had to be a large institution with a very big dedicated single-family rental desk that managed all your acquisitions, all your property management, and all that.

It was hard for a private equity firm that does ten different things and has two people allocated to the SFR strategy to go and deploy $100 million and manage those assets. What Roofstock specializes in is bringing that institutional quality sourcing acquisition and management platform to either other institutions that don't have the same infrastructure built or retail investors for that matter who would never be able to scale up and build an institutional-level platform of their own.

That's already there. That has been built over the last seven years. Now we can use Web3, which is a different way of distributing these assets. We can use Web3 to attract new clients that want to get into this but have the same infrastructure behind the scenes that is managing and taking care of all the hard work with respect to the properties themselves. That's on the SFR side.

For a long time, I've seen how inefficient TradFi is. Every time I read the Compound white paper, I get goosebumps because it's so elegant and beautifully written. It does what it's supposed to do. We have been looking at all the DeFi protocols, whether they're crypto-based over-collateralized lending or any other real-world assets like non-crypto credit, etc. We have a strong idea of how a purpose-built DeFi protocol for real-world assets can work.

It's our hope that Geoff and I will get to spend some time in 2023 to potentially even look at building more RWA-specific DeFi protocols. In the meantime, we believe strongly that real-world assets do have a big role to play in DeFi in the coming future. We want to work with other DeFi protocols or NFT lenders. We're talking to a bunch of these companies that all came at this from their use cases. Maybe some of them set up an NFT lending platform based on lending to PFP-NFTs like Apes and Punks.

The NFT trading volume has fallen subsequent since 2021's high. The floor prices have come down significantly. Maybe they're all looking for other use cases to also enter into. There are the NFT lenders and the DeFi protocols themselves. We want to have a dialogue with all of these market participants to see where our product would be a good fit and for this to be a start to how you can start bringing in other either on-chain credit or non-crypto assets into the blockchain.

You might have heard about Centrifuge's announcement. They secured a deal with Maker for $220 million for doing non-crypto credit. We're seeing a lot of good projects get a lot of traction. We all collectively should work on bringing real-world assets into crypto and DeFi. That's how we help the industry grow in 2023.

Jeff is nodding his head because he understands these pain points intimately from a very long time in the world of real estate. I've purchased a few properties. One didn't work out so well. The other did. I know Eathan has done a little bit of real estate. We're so excited about how you are going about this and all the partnerships that you're forging. One of those is the Origin Protocol crew. We know them well. They're great guys. It sounds like you're working on this on-chain connection for real-world properties to the blockchain with them. How is that going to work?

Anytime you're looking at a real-world asset, there's going to be an on-chain component and an off-chain component to it. For example, you can do a few things like pricing oracles and things like that where you can use Automated Valuation Models or AVMs to get some price indication, but if you want to know about the condition of the property, somebody has to go to the property, do an inspection, take updated pictures, and so on.

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When we look at how we can make this experience seamless for people in Web3, part of it is having an NFT marketplace where it's a little bit more user-friendly than more generic NFT marketplaces. As Geoff mentioned earlier, one of the things we do need to do is add a layer of KYC because ultimately, you're buying an LLC. That LLC has a property in it under existing laws. We do need to know who you are. We can't sell an LLC to a Russian oligarch, for example.

The way we do that is you come to the website onChain.Roofstock.com, and then mint a membership token. The membership token is also an ERC-721 but it's designed to be a Soulbound. You can then come and opt-in to get KYC-ed. That is done with a third-party provider. We don't get involved in that ourselves. Jumio does the KYC. It can be done in under a minute for most people living in the US.

Once that's done, we go and update your Soulbound token with a KYC-ed flag or a verified buyer flag. If you're a non-verified buyer and you're looking to buy one of these NFTs in an NFT marketplace, what happens is in the smart contract transfer function, we check to see if the KYC flag is on or not. If it's not on, then that transfer fails. You will see this nasty message show up in your wallet when that transfer fails.

The stuff that Origin is doing is trying to be the Shopify of NFT marketplaces by customizing a little bit to make the user experience more pleasant. For example, in this case, when that exception comes across, they will trap that exception and show a nicer message saying, "You need to follow this link to go here. Get KYC-ed before you try to buy this property." We think of Origin as they’re trying to be the Shopify of this world as opposed to the Etsy of this world.

On Etsy, there are multiple vendors selling multiple things. It's a similar look and feel. Shopify is a little bit more customized. We look at them as the guys who are trying to become the Shopify for the NFT marketplaces. That partnership is going great. I mentioned earlier that there's a whole stack of infrastructure that needs to be in place to allow something like this to happen.

For example, if you think about payment crypto on-ramp and off-ramp, it's not easy to go and buy $100,000 USDC if you're a retail investor. We have a partnership with Wyre. Wyre allows easy conversion back and forth between fiat and crypto for us. That has been working phenomenally. The first sale was done with financing through Teller.

That's an amazing group of individuals as well who will move to get things done. We met the CEO of Teller at the Converge conference in San Francisco at the end of September 2022. The sale happened in mid-October 2022. In a couple of weeks, they were able to string a solution together that made this happen. Selling a property as an NFT is new and novel, especially if you're settling it on an NFT marketplace.

There are no other documents to sign behind the scene, but when you add financing to that, it makes it magical. We're very grateful for all these industry participants who have built various solutions and infrastructure pieces. We now have the opportunity to come to the table with a new protocol and a new way of selling rental properties. We're stringing all these market participants together to make it happen.

I'm also struck by a lot of the pieces here. It's harder before it gets easier. If you look at software as a service and how huge that market has become, it started with, "I want to do all this accounting on paper. I know there's a better way to do it with software, but then somebody has to go in and write the software to do the accounting, handle all the exceptions, and get it all together. Thankfully, you guys in Origin are working on that to make it easier for everyone.

In the Web2 world, we often think about how companies operate. It’s build everything yourself. If you need a marketplace, most people will try to build a marketplace themselves if they're enterprise-level customers. The smaller mom-and-pop shops use Etsy and other solutions that are available. With Web3, one of the greatest benefits is so many different people in the industry have had incredible ideas and a vision of a better future. They have all built little widgets and tools to make that happen. You now have the benefit of saying, "We have all these companies. There's a way to string them together in a specific way to solve a real-world use case." That's super exciting.

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Aside from the partnership with Origin, I know you're partnering with Wyre, Cypher, and others. Are there any other collaborations we should keep an eye out for in the future here?

We will try to integrate with some additional DeFi lenders. There's always a need for debt, capital, and real estate. The vision that we have for that is something of a marketplace where different lenders come with different terms, and each borrower chooses what suits them best. One of the advantages of DeFi is that it can be much more flexible in terms of loan terms than traditional loans. We expect to see some interesting structural choices there. We will see how that develops as we bring more lenders on.

We have been fortunate to be accepted by the Web3 community. We have good relationships with folks at Compound, Maker, Maple Finance, and so on. We do on a regular basis talk to a lot of these guys to understand what they're working on and what challenges they're facing. Eventually, we do think it's going to be a collective effort to bring more real-world assets into Web3 and DeFi, but once that happens and people see that convenience, that's when the switch will flip for the more Web2 customers to start adopting Web3 as a new way of doing things. We're optimistic and enthusiastic about that.

Especially people that have gone through the traditional purchasing process and feel the pain of it in that present moment. They will be like, "You could do what? They did what? How quick was it? How easy was it?"

We are having those conversations interestingly with traditional Roofstock buyers as well who are like, "I heard about this. Is this real? Can you do properties for me this way?" It's starting to happen. I hope it matures in the coming months and more people get to know about it.

Before we head to our next segment and close this one out, is there anything else to share about where you're at with Roofstock? What's coming next? We have covered a lot of ground. Is there anything else?

It's exciting. We are closing our second property in the collection. That's happening as we speak. We will start renovating that and getting it prepared for a tokenized sale in the coming weeks. We hope to document some of that renovation process as an educational tool for crypto natives who might be afraid. They might be on the sidelines about real estate. They might have heard it's a good alternative investment but they're afraid to get in because they don't understand what it means to buy, own, and manage real estate. We want to try and educate the community a little bit about it. We're going to probably do a series of educational content drips on that in social media over the coming weeks.

These are exciting times. Congrats on number two. There are so many more to come. We appreciate you sharing all the details. That's exciting stuff. Our audience is going to be pumped about this if they're not familiar with it already. We do want to shift gears a little bit and move to our next segment, which is called Edge Quick Hitters. It's a fun and quick way for us to get to know you a little bit better. They're short questions. There are only ten of them with short responses but we may dive a little bit deeper here or there. Geoff, let's start with you. Question number one, what's the first thing you remember ever purchasing in your life?

It's a Star Wars action figure circa 1981. This would be the original Star Wars action figure.

Do you have any of these still floating around?

They are carefully packed up in the garage.

Congrats. That's awesome. Sanjay, how about you?

I did not come from as affluent a family as Geoff, so I only had enough money for a piece of candy.

What are your go-to these days? Are you still a candy guy?

It's more ice cream these days.

We've all got our sweets. Geoff, question number two, what's the first thing you remember ever selling in your life?

I sold a Spider-Man comic to my friend when I was 8 or 9. That was a big deal.

There's that collectible theme going on over there. Sanjay, how about you?

I worked on a deal to sell some T-shirts to a college when I was out of high school and was looking to make a little extra money. The deal didn't go so well. I lost a bunch of money on it but I did make a sale.

You learned a valuable life lesson.

It didn't stop you from wanting to be in the transaction business.

Question number three, Geoff, what's the most recent thing you purchased?

A ton of holiday presents. Does that count?

It does. It's that time of year.

Did you pick out something for yourself too?

I have not.

It's always tempting when you see those sales, "One for you. One for me."

There's that new updated ledger. That looks sexy. I might have my eye on that.

It's the presale.

Sanjay, how about you? What's the most recent thing you purchased?

I went and bought a bunch of Starbucks gift cards for the staff and teachers at my kids' school. I was sitting and writing notes. I went and dropped it off.

Question number four, Geoff, what's the most recent thing you sold?

I sold a catio. A catio is a patio for cats. We have five Maine Coons. They enjoy their outdoor time. We had a catio, which we sold and upgraded.

Do you know about Maine Coons? I just learned about this, Josh and Jeff.

What is it?

They're cats but they're huge. It depends on the actual cat. One of our fans has one that I met on Discord. They're huge. There are all these pictures of people on the internet holding a Maine Coon. It looks like it's Photoshopped because the cats are so giant.

That's what I love about them. They were 25 pounds or even more. They're bigger than small dogs and lap dogs.

They can hold their own when they're facing off against a little pup. Is that what you're saying?

Easily.

In my neighborhood, bobcats run around freely but we don't keep them at home.

I'm checking out some of these pictures.

It's called a catio. That's what it was.

The vocab for this episode is the Maine Coon and catio.

In 200 episodes, that's the first introduction.

I'm looking at one of these Maine Coons. It's as big as a 5-foot adult. These things are crazy.

When they stretch out and stand up, yes.

We will get back on track here. Sanjay, what's the most recent thing you sold?

I don't have one of those catio experiences. I'm afraid I'm going to have to go with 149 Cottage Lake Way in Columbia, South Carolina.

That's solid though. That's a good claim to fame. Question number five, Geoff, what's your most prized possession?

I'm going to go with my wedding ring. It speaks for itself. My wife has a couple of different cultures. Her name is written in this in three different languages on the inside.

I didn't know that about you, Geoff. I'm glad to hear about it at the show.

That's super cool. I hope you get some points for that answer also. Sanjay, how about you?

I don't know if I would call it possession but I'm thankful for my family. It keeps me anchored and focused on what I need to do personally and professionally. I'm grateful for that.

We very much appreciate that. We will flip the order a little bit here as we proceed. Sanjay, we will start with you. If you could buy anything in the world, digital, physical, service or experience that's currently for sale, what would it be? What do you have your eye on?

I would say I'm not one of those guys that need fast cars, fancy yards and stuff. I just buy a portfolio of real estate homes that can produce cashflow. I'll put it in the family trust, so it can fund a 529 account for my kids' college. When they go to college, I'll give it to them so it helps them with their living expenses.

I like that answer. I'm going to go to a beach house.

Can I also take the beach house?

There's no limit. Do you have a particular beach you're interested in, Geoff?

I'll take any one where the water is warm and clear.

There's one called Siesta Key. That's not too shabby.

There may be some deals in the Bahamas these days.

I'll go with Kaanapali in Maui. That's my favorite.

Question number seven, Sanjay, if you could pass on one of your personality traits to the next generation, what would that be?

There's no real substitute for hard work. I hope my kids learn that. These days, I find it a little odd that a lot of people feel entitled to things and have in a way forgotten the value of hard work. I hope my kids retain that from me and understand that there's no substitute. You have to work hard to achieve things in your life.

Roger that. Geoff, how about you?

At the risk of being boring, it's the same answer. It's the ability to work hard for long periods of time. I want my kids to have that.

I understood why you guys are good partners. Question number eight, Sanjay, if you could eliminate one of your personality traits from the next generation, what would that be?

It's probably procrastination. It's partly because when I'm working hard, there are little things that fall off the cracks. I have a hot tub that I haven't cleaned in a couple of months now. My kids keep asking, "When can I jump into the hot tub?" I'm like, "Give me another week." I hope I can get better at balancing some of those things and not procrastinating and pass that on to my kids.

I can relate. Geoff, how about you?

I would not want to pass on my dance moves to my kids. That's not a trait I would excel in.

Maybe we will have a chance to see what the story is there at NFT LA or something.

It has to happen. We all have to be judges of whether that's a trait you want to pass or not. NFT LA it is.

There could be an epic dance-off between Josh and Geoff.

I have a story about terrible dance moves. I don't even think I could communicate it. You have to see it.

We should talk about this on social media and start selling tickets.

Let's do it.

I'm going to try to communicate this very quickly. I used to study birds. I did a PhD in biology, neuroscience, and birds. There's a dancing cockatoo that got a lot of attention. They wrote a paper about it because it could dance to a beat. That's very impressive. The bird can dance to a beat. This is amazing. It's groundbreaking. It was on a stage at the World Science Festival. The dancing cockatoo is dancing to the Backstreet Boys or something like this and had a panel of college professors, researchers, and very awkward people. The moderator of the panel gets up and starts dancing with the cockatoo, and then all of the people on the panel start dancing with the cockatoo. It was the most awkward dance situation I've ever seen.

All we need to do is bring a cockatoo to NFT LA, and then we're all set.

Geoffrey, if you want to feel better about your dance moves, look it up. It's online somewhere.

There's something that's even more cringe than myself. That's great.

You can pick your music, Geoff. It doesn't have to be Backstreet Boys. I'm supportive of something else.

We look forward to that one. Moving on, question number nine is a little easier here. Sanjay, what did you do before joining us on the show?

I was trying to catch up on some DeFi white papers. One other thing is somebody announced that President Trump was dropping NFTs. I went up to look at which company was issuing these NFTs. It was NFT INT LLC registered in Delaware. I tweeted and said, "If somebody wants to go and research this company and learn more about it, here's the company that's doing the job."

That video is something else. Geoff, how about you?

Unfortunately, I saw that too. You can't unsee it. I was reading some of the pleadings that have been filed in the FTX case.

That thing is interesting, to say the least. Here's the last one. Question ten, Sanjay, what are you doing next after the show?

I'll go back to my DeFi white paper reading.

Geoff, how about you?

We have another round of edits to our transaction documents, which I'm holding the pen on at the moment.

That's Edge Quick Hitters. We appreciate it. Those are good answers and lots of fun. We have some Hot Topics lined up here. Let's jump over to that.

The first one is, "Bieber, Madonna named in a lawsuit alleging Yuga Labs NFT scheme. A number of celebrities, including Bieber, Paris Hilton, Jimmy Fallon, and Madonna were named as plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit alleging that Yuga Labs' NFT collections were misleadingly promoted and resulted in financial damage to the defendants. The Hash panel discusses the implications of celebrity endorsements in the crypto space." This is interesting. If I'm reading this right now, and the celebrities are crying foul here.

The headline is misleading. The celebrities would be the defendants and whoever is suing them would be the plaintiffs.

If I understood that correctly, they're alleging that these were promoted by celebrities. Probably the celebrities either weren't disclosing that they were getting paid in connection with the advertisement or they made some misleading claims about, "This is only going up." It all depends. It's all very facts and circumstances-dependent but generally, this tends to be people who are trying to recover their losses after they made a risky bet. They knew what they were getting into. They're just trying to find a way.

It's largely an opportunistic play to try and see if you can shake down the celebs for some money, but the broader question to think about here is if a project is a pure PFP project, it has utilities. For example, if you own Apes, you can attend ApeFest. There's some utility to that. Technically, you're buying it because you're getting some personal utility out of it and putting some value to that utility. That's how you're transacting these. Where it gets a little bit confusing is if some celebrity comes and says, "I have one of these. You should look into getting one of these."

Somehow in the minds of people, especially traders, they are thinking, "If Jimmy Fallon has one of these, maybe it's going to go up in value so I should buy one now, sell it tomorrow, and make a profit," the discussion then starts going in a different direction. That's why in this particular lawsuit, the lawyers are alleging that the NFTs were a sale of security because the buyers may have had some expectation of profits and then ended up making losses. They felt like they had been rugged by these celebrities.

Having said that, to Geoff's point, these are probably opportunistic shakedowns. Personally, I would feel more comfortable if celebs don't get involved in trying to shill projects. Most notably in the recent past, you might have heard about Mr. Wonderful coming and saying all kinds of things praising SBF and saying that Binance and CZ cost FTX to go down. He was paid $15 million to be a spokesperson for FTX.

A lot of this becomes tricky because when you have these role models talk about projects, you may not do the diligence yourself and go with what your role models are saying. My preference would be to keep everything clean. I would much rather the celebs don't get involved in these kinds of things. Having said that, most of these class action lawsuits will probably fizzle out.

To your point, the news of the day previously was about Kim Kardashian and Floyd Mayweather getting sued in relation to EthereumMax. EthereumMax didn't go so well. It was an extremely speculative project, but California dismissed that lawsuit stating that investors are expected to act reasonably before placing bets on the zeitgeist of the moment. California is a little bit more on the liberal side of things. Geoffrey, I'm sure you would say. As a society, we want our cake. We want to eat it too. We want the freedom to invest our money how we want and be responsible citizens. With that comes the potential of additional risk that you don't get from buying a bond. Even bonds are risky. Everything is risky at the end of the day.

This all goes back to the classic logical fallacy of appeal to authority. I'm seeing online argumentum ad verecundiam, the fallacy of appealing to the testimony of an authority outside of a special field. Anyone can give opinions or advice. The fallacy only occurs when the reason for assenting to the conclusion is based on following the improper authority.

All these celebrity endorsements if anything should be taken with a grain of salt. They're all financed usually. Oftentimes, there's a payment involved. It means nothing for a basketball player to endorse a shoe or a soda. It means very little. It works. That's what it means. People do fall prey to this fallacy but it doesn't mean there's any value to anything. That's the responsibility of the buyer beware.

Bonus points for finding the Latin phrase. I've never heard that before.

There's this thing called Google.

When you have a PhD in biology, you've probably come across some Latin phrases.

You throw Latin around every day.

When you have to take the GRE, you come across these things.

Eathan knows lots of stuff.

Let's hit the next headline, "Polygon's NFT market demonstrates signs of significant increased adoption but not growth in sale volume. There's increased adoption. Thanks to its collaborations with name-brand companies such as Reddit. Despite the crypto winter, the first-time returning buyers per day in Polygon's NFT market reached a new all-time high during the last month of the year per data from blockchain analytics platform Nansen. The surge comes as NF T ecosystems on other chains such as Ethereum and Solana have a decreasing number of uses. The users per week dropped from over 160,000 users in late September to less than 60,000 users, while Ethereum users per week drop only roughly 250,000 users to some 183,000 users in the same time period."

What's the point they're making there? There's increased adoption but a decrease in users. What's the difference between adoption and users?

The idea is there's new blood in the game, but the new blood that was there a few months ago isn't there. That's the idea.

The way I interpret this, and this is just my opinion, is that on Polygon especially, I've seen a lot more fun projects take off. People buy these for whatever reasons or they get airdropped. You mint them for free, but then they may not necessarily be in every instance tradable assets. What makes an NFT project a good tradable asset is, in my opinion, there are only two things. One is how strong the founding team is. What’s their vision, and how are they working towards implementing that vision that continues to increase value to that project and the community?

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The second is how active is your community involved in that project. Even the floor prices of blue chips like Apes and Punks dropped significantly since 2021. In general, the NFT trading volume itself is down 90% based on some reports. Ultimately, the NFT industry is going to have to reinvent itself a little bit because the days of just throwing money at NFT projects without fully understanding the vision of the founders are over in some sense.

These days, especially if you follow NFT projects all the time, projects come and they have a pre-mint prize. The floor drops almost immediately after the mint is done because people have this expectation that the price is going to keep going up, but the founders have to work on new innovations, whether it's dropping additional collections or creating IRL events or partnerships. All of these things have to come to fruition. The community has to continue to see value in the projects. That's what's going to keep the trade volume up. In some sense, some of the blue chips will survive this crypto winter. Coming out of it, they might come up with innovative ideas.

Yuga came out with other deeds. With all those other plans, they have to create a metaverse and then allow even other NFT projects to interact with the metaverse and stuff. Projects are going to have to keep innovating and coming up with new things. That's what's going to keep the trade volume going. Eventually, at some point, trade volumes fall. The floors fall. For most of these other projects, once the value is sub 1 ETH, then it's in a death spiral. There's nothing to revive them at that point.

One thing to elevate is regardless of the project, folks are seeing success now. There are important elements there to study and understand the why behind that. It's hard to pull something off that is successful or sustainably successful in this market. If you don't have real value, there's not something underlying and underpinning it. All of us are looking around when we see these things happen. It's worth trying to peel a couple of layers of the onion back and understand what's happening there and some of that why. We're going to find in most cases that there's real value being created for folks on both sides of the table. It comes down to that. All those projects that weren't creating real value fell by the wayside for a reason. That's a macro thing that I take away from this.

Humanity is a victim of shiny object syndrome. We have been and always will be, whether it's some new toy, a new game, a new app or Lensa. We were fascinated by this technology. People got a little bit overzealous. I'm not sure that this won't happen again. There could be an iteration of Web4.0 or a new type of NFT that causes hysteria again. I hope that we remember some of what happened here and get a little bit smarter about asking the hard questions.

We had an ICO boom in some major projects. EOS has not lived up to its hype as some have. Tezos is holding strong. Filecoin is still doing amazing things. If we could all remember that 1 out of 100 of these projects will live on to stand the test of time, we can embrace the moment, celebrate the innovation and the disruption, but also keep our hype in check.

That's a great point.

How do you see Polygon from your perspective of being deep into the NFT space? Is that a promising chain for NFTs? Does it bring something that others don't?

I'm parsing out the headline here. There is growth in users but not growth in sale volume, which also means that the sale volume per user was lower. People are coming in at a lower price point, which has less risk.

The CEO of Polygon said that was a good thing because it's a more stable thing. When you look at chains like Solana, Polygon, Avalanche, and Cosmos in addition to some of the new ones like Aptos and Sweet, not to mention Klaytn, all these chains are interesting because you have some smart people and passionate developers and creators that are supporting all of them. Polygon has that potential based on what they have built in the community that supports them.

At the same time, Ethereum is looking good. The major hurdle there was gas prices and congestion. We had a consensus on celebrating the merger. It's going to require these other chains to keep innovating to differentiate between them and Ethereum, and them from each other. I don't have a long-term prediction. There's no indication that they're going to fade off into the sunset. It's a matter of seeing how 2022 shakes out. It's hard to predict, in my opinion.

We can say having collaborated with them in a number of different ways that it's a sharp group of people that have aligned core values and are working genuinely to try to create value for their community and do things that will build the ecosystem. If you're going to place bets on who's going to succeed in doing that, it's folks like it that you want to support. By and large, those guys have demonstrated that time and again over the last several years. It's a solid group of folks. We don't know who the winners will be or not ultimately but I like to bet on people above all else.

I concur with that as well. There are some interesting and fun projects getting launched on Polygon. We have heard about the sports stuff and all that but I'm close to the Pudgy guys. They're up to something as well. It will probably be announced shortly. They're going to be doing some stuff on Polygon.

That's a little intel there. Should we hit one more Hot Topic real quick? Should we move on?

Let's hit the last one.

It is interesting. The headline says, "Gamers are more interested in earning Bitcoin than NFTs. Researchers found that 67% of respondents to a study are more likely to play free games if the games offered crypto rewards. Out of the survey participants, 45% believe there are benefits in being able to trade game characters and items with other gamers while 23% said that it may have a negative impact."

"The remaining 32% did not comment. Apart from these, the study also found 27% of respondents are interested in earning Bitcoin in games while only 5% are interested in earning NFTs. It suggests that more gamers are interested in getting Bitcoin in play-to-earn games than simply getting NFTs." That's fascinating. They're both taking a beating lately.

Do you want $1 in your pocket or a digital item? It depends on the psychology of the gamer and why they're playing the game.

I want a Roofstock game where I can start to earn shares in my investment property. I'll take that. That sounds pretty awesome.

We will add that to the roadmap.

You can't equate Bitcoin and the category of NFTs. What is the NFT? If that was the question, Apes is going to win.

What I find fascinating about all this is during the pandemic in Asian countries, Axie Infinity became a way of earning money for their families because a lot of people didn't have jobs. They couldn't leave their houses. They started getting into this and made $200 to $300 a month. That was more money than they had ever made before. That started a trend for these play-to-earn type games. For example, even if you're going to be using Brave the browser, you start getting some rewards for doing that. That can be monetized.

Similarly, if you think about gaming, some people will want to play for the fun of it and the utility of it. For them, the in-game assets and NFTs could be useful. You can transfer those, trade those, or sell them but if people are looking at it as a way to make some extra income on the side, it certainly makes sense that they would want to be paid in Bitcoin for that.

There's a little bit of contradiction here too. Every question is different but if 45% believe there are benefits to trading game characters and items, then you would think the same 45% would like those to be NFT-connected.

It depends on whether they're earning that and then they're able to trade it versus if they have to buy it and then trade it. There are probably going to be two different classes of players. There are ones that are doing it for fun and would be looking at trading opportunities, and then the others that want to use it as a side hustle and make some money.

It gets pretty close to gambling at that point, depending on where the money that they're earning comes from. If they're paying to play the game, and then they have a chance of earning it back, it becomes a little bit of a circuitous game of Bingo. If it's coming from advertisers, and the game is so amazing that there's all this advertising money in that ecosystem, it's different. Where's the proof of work? As long as they're working to get it, it's interesting but I don't know if it's necessarily good for the long-term health of the gaming industry to start handing out Bitcoin to everyone.

I do completely agree with you. If it's advertiser-funded revenues that are being shared with the users of the platform, that's a healthy thing. The use cases where you have to buy in to play the game, and then you get paid out of it for playing become dangerous because the only way you can make money in a sustained fashion in something like that is if you keep throwing your user base that keeps buying in.

At some point, exponentially, you might get the early adopters and it might work for the first few months but once that peaks out, then you've got all these people who have put money into the game. The distributions are low and meaningless. I don't know what the latest deal is with STEPN but for a while, people were buying their virtual shoes and walking every day so they could make money. Unless you keep growing the STEPN user base and they're all buying virtual shoes all the time, I don't know how much you can distribute over time.

Is there that much difference between that and the late-night Sunday poker game at the casino where it's the same twenty guys that always show up? They're recycling each other's money and giving a little bit of money to the house every week.

That's a good analogy.

We successfully got through those hot topics. There are lots of interesting conversations there. Thanks for participating so actively.

We appreciate it.

It's fun.

Our next segment is a little bit of fun as well. It's a quick one but very nice. We always enjoy a shout-out segment. We understand you have a couple of folks you might be interested in giving a shout-out to. Do you have anybody special in mind?

To preface it, it's a great idea. You are the only ones that have this concept as far as I know. It's super good. Everyone works so hard in this ecosystem. There's never enough time to call out everyone who has done the work. Hats off to you for even having that concept. We do have someone in mind. I'll let Sanjay speak to that.

Both Geoff and I unanimously agreed that if we had to recognize one person, that would be Lorenzo Melendez who's the CTO of Pudgy Penguins. Geoff and I met him earlier in 2022 when we were accepted into the Wharton Cypher Accelerator. He was part of the cohort there. He was a 22-year-old kid or something at the time. Now, he's a little bit older. We recognized immediately that this guy had this immense wealth of knowledge about Web3, Solidity and Ethereum that we would not be able to acquire ourselves in a lifetime of learning.

It's a whole different generation. In middle school, you were building mining rigs and mining shitcoin. You've grown with that whole Web3 ecosystem. In my case, I'm almost 50. I predate even Web1. I was there before the web, Web1, and Web2, and now I'm trying to get smart about Web3, but there's this entire generation that grew up on Web3. They're amazing. They're knowledgeable. They're superstars. Lorenzo was instrumental in this project going from inception to execution in such a short time. We couldn't have done it without him. Geoff, is there anything you would like to add to that?

You said it well.

On socials, it's fun to try to say @0xLoMel. Good luck in finding Lorenzo on socials. That's always great. Part of this segment I always enjoy is people that might be under the radar for everyone or someone else to look up and check something out. That's great. We appreciate that. Should we wrap up? Jeff, do you want to take care of that?

First, let's make sure that we let folks know where to follow you and the project. If you had socials you would like to share, please spread the word to our audience.

I'm @_GThomps on Twitter.

I'm @ETH_Sanjay. More importantly, our project is @RSonChain. We would love for more people to be part of the community. 2023 is going to be great. We're going to start with this house we're buying in Georgia. Geoff and I will hopefully fly over and make a trip there, and meet up with the construction crew that's working to rehab it once we purchase it. We will start documenting some of this and sharing everything there is to know about this house that's coming up soon. Follow us and be part of the journey.

We will be keeping a close eye on there. The word on the street also is we've got a little giveaway that we put together as well. Would you like to share a little bit about that?

We have commissioned an artist to come up with five custom NFTs. He's going to draw. We're in real estate. These are going to be homes. We will probably have different landscapes like the seaside, mountains, and deserts. We would like it to be something original and custom, and not something that was quickly generated. It's going to take a couple of weeks or so for the artists to finish all the work and get these things done, but we would love to offer those five NFTs to the audience here. You can probably help us with that in terms of liking and sharing content and stuff like that. If you can help pick the winners, that would be fantastic.

We will get all the details out on socials abound that. That's super generous of you. We appreciate that.

I feel like one of them should have those plastic palm trees that you exchanged.

I love it.

We have to locate those if they still have them at the office, Geoff.

They were inflatable.

That's a wrap on this spotlight-sponsored episode. We have reached the outer limit at the show for today. Thanks for exploring with us. We've got space for more adventures on this starship, so invite your friends and recruit some cool strangers that will make this journey all so much better. How? Go to Spotify or iTunes, rate us and say something awesome. Go to EdgeOfNFT.com to dive further down the rabbit hole. Look us up on all major social platforms by typing EdgeOfNFT and start a fun conversation with us online. Lastly, be sure to tune in next time for more great NFT content. Thanks so much for sharing this time with us.

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About Geoffrey Thompson

A seasoned business and legal executive, startup advisor, and web3 builder with 15+ years of experience in both web3 product development and traditional corporate legal experience through multiple business cycles.

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About Sanjay Raghavan

web3, NFT, DeFi leadership in Fintech/Proptech! Please reach out if you you are an expert in NFT and DeFi protocols, and DAO structures.

Head of web3 Initiatives at Roofstock. Part of Wharton School's Cypher Blockchain Accelerator Genesis Block cohort- https://stevenscenter.wharton.upenn.edu/accelerator/

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